I'm a student who studies English, and I have a sentence I do not understand.
The sentence is from the article which about the search for aircraft that vanished from radar last year. The article said
The search has been anything but smooth.
but I couldn't catch what it means.
I think if they want to express that the search was useless (they've found nothing), they should say
The search has been nothing (not anything).
and I don't know what the "but smooth" means.
Please Let me know about it.